As a frequent user of Google search and other Google products and features, I've decided to write a feedback blog including my suggestions and critiques.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Small Google Calculator bugs

Here are some small Google Calculator bugs.

Bug #1:

The Google Calculator results of these arbitrary calculations include a space instead of nothing or a comma:

32*128
32 * 128 = 4 096

33*27*8

33 * 27 * 8 = 7 128

44+7^4
44 + (7^4) = 2 445

The reason it's a trivial bug is that a user may copy and paste one of these results into another equation and get an error because Google Calculator inserted an erroneous space.

Bug #2:

If you perform a Google Calculator operation, under the computational result Google displays a link asking you whether you want to search for documents containing the terms you entered in the search box.

Example:(823^2)*5/9082((823^2) * 5) / 9 082 = 372.896388

Search for documents containing the terms (823^2)*5/9082.

You might expect the suggested search to return documents containing the calculation:

(823^2)*5/9082However, if you click the link Google Search runs this erroneous query:

823 2 * "5 9082"

Google threw away the "^" and "/" operators, probably changed the "*" multiplication operator to a string wildcard operator, and for unknown, spurious, reasons it changed 5/9082 to an exact phrase by surrounding it with quotes.